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Let's Talk About Great Expectations

Wednesday, 21 September 2016

"I have been bent and broken - but I hope into better shape" - Great Expectations, Charles Dickens

This post was very spur of the moment and random but having just finished Great Expectations I felt compelled to write about it. Not in review form but in a different way to my usual 'book posts'. Great Expectations is a book I've read a few times before but, after being set it for summer reading, it really struck me that, despite it being an old book, we can take so much from it.
It's a book about growing up, everyone grows up, but it's about growing up an experiencing things that subvert from what you expected of them. About how money doesn't actually make you happy. When Pip is in the company of rich people he's dissatisfied, when he is rich himself, he's unhappy and selfish. It touches upon how disappointment can shape you for the better, no good person has had no setbacks and hasn't had to work at something. It's a novel about ambition, about self-improvement, how conscience and loyalty are far more important than class and wealth. Our 'great expectations' in life can sometimes be disappointing but everyone can take something from that and those experiences of disappointment.

Although published in 1861, before the days of technology and everything else that has come with the twenty-first century, we can take so much from Dickens' Great Expectations and I think that just by reading it, everyone can take a valuable lesson from it.